It's likely that commercial whaling has released around one hundred million tons of carbon to the atmosphere over a century or so. That's according to researcher Andrew Pershing, who believes that carbon credit schemes could be employed as an incentive to protect whales and large fish such as bluefin tuna.

In a joint project backed by the University of Maine, US, and Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Pershing compared whales to redwood trees as a store of carbon. Blue whales contain around nine tons of carbon; in the biological world, only large trees can store more than this. Using this analogy, whaling becomes equivalent to a forest fire, potentially releasing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere or 'at the very least, removing it from the marine environment and putting it somewhere else,' Pershing told a press conference at the AGU Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, US.

Populations of whales, it turns out, are in some ways better at storing carbon than forests. Once a forest has finished growing or regenerating and reached a steady state it tends not to store any additional carbon - each tree that dies and releases its carbon to the atmosphere is replaced by another. But the bodies of whales that die naturally tend to sink to the ocean floor. If the whale dies in a deep area of ocean the carbon from its body could remain locked away for a couple of hundred years.

Whaling, on the other hand, has in the past led to use of the whale's body parts in products, such as lamp oil and animal feed. This probably enabled an earlier release of carbon to the atmosphere. Even if the entire whale was not removed from the ocean, its hacked-up remains were likely to have been consumed by smaller organisms in surface waters, rather than sinking to the depths. This would again have led to quicker recycling of the carbon.

Pershing calculated that one hundred years of whaling have added 105 million tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere. This is equivalent to the carbon released by burning 130,000 sq km of temperate forest or by 128,000 Hummers driving for 100 years. To perform the sums, Pershing assumed that all the carbon in a whale killed by humans is released to the atmosphere.

Although the carbon released by whaling is just a small fraction of the 7 billion tonnes that man emitted in 2005, Pershing says it is comparable to the amount that would be saved by other proposed carbon management and storage schemes. 'Whales were the oil of the 1700s and 1800s,' he added.

Having compared whales to trees, Pershing also introduced poodles to illustrate that larger animals are more efficient at storing carbon. Zelda, his wife's 6 pound toy poodle, eats one cup of food a day. His standard poodle Padawan, meanwhile, which is ten times heavier than Zelda, eats just five cups of food per day. So Padawan is using relatively less carbon, in the form of food, to store the carbon already in his body.

Because of this greater efficiency of larger animals, Pershing says his findings provide an incentive to focus on conserving large species of marine organisms, such as whales, sharks and tuna. Populations of some of these animals and fish are down by 90% or more.

For the same reason it makes sense to focus on large individuals of each species. In the case of fish, large individuals also tend to produce more eggs, so this approach should increase the population's recovery rate.

Not everyone agrees that killing whales has affected the level of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. 'It is obvious that the dramatic decrease in the whale populations has greatly altered the world's ocean ecosystem. However, I don't think that whale hunting has had any major impact on the level of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere,' said Vasily Spiridonov, a consultant of the Marine Program of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Related news

With a steady decline in energy performance of the original water-source-heat pump system and sharp increases in the cost of water, Seventh & Chestnut Associates and Waverly Management LLC looked for new options to reduce maintenance and water use.
According to Philadelphia-based Urban Engineers Inc., the four original 250-ton forced-draft, closed-circuit cooling towers were consuming significant amounts of water through evaporation. Even after several repairs and modifications, the boilers were unable to...

Fast and cost effective cleaning
Saving time and water are some of the KPIs which have the most attention in the hygienic industries. The new Alfa Laval TJ40G rotary tank cleaning machine uses a high-impact jet stream to effectively clean tough tank residues and minimize the risk of product contamination. This four-nozzle rotary jet head also cleans tanks 60% faster than static spray ball technology, which increases production uptime. And because it cleans faster, this new device uses less water and less...

Facing a unique set of challenges associated with water treatment. The PeaceHealth facilities team in Springfield, Oregon employed sponge ball tube cleaning innovation to their front lines……with game-changing success!PeaceHealth was restricted from using chemical water treatment due to their proximity to a blue ribbon trout stream. Their non-chemical water treatment program was struggling and they experienced out of control biological growth in their 6,000 ton chiller system. After each chiller tube...

Craft brewers know that high-strength wastewater can put a burden on local treatment facilities and potentially cost money. The best way to protect the environment and the bottom line is to manage wastewater on-site before it goes down the drain.
Water & Beer is an online portal that provides breweries with learning modules on good water and by-product management practices that save money, time and the environment. The newest module – Improve Brewery Design – outlines how brewery design and...

During most of this last year, Suwannee County farmer Sammy Starling never had to guess when he did—or didn’t—need to water his corn. With a new smart-agriculture technology, he could access soil moisture readings right from his phone, with updates every three hours.
This information helped Starling determine when to turn on the irrigation system and when to skip a cycle. “It’s a window to the underground world,” he said.
Thanks to a University of Florida Institute of Food...

Customer comments

No comments were found for Could carbon credit schemes save the whale?. Be the first to comment!